If you want to perform a penetration test on your digital infrastructure, you, your developer, the infrastructure team, and your program management staff must be ready.
Even though you can prepare for a penetration test in a matter of hours if the organization has a limited scope of work, knowing what to accomplish from the penetration testing is more important.
A penetration test is perceived by many internal IT teams as a time-consuming nightmare. However, with the right planning and communication, a penetration test is a simple, important, and beneficial process for any firm.
You will get the best outcomes from your test, including strong results that allow you to apply the necessary mitigations, which are more likely if you have prepared adequately.
Before we start with it, let’s go through what Penetration Testing is.
Penetration testing is a security exercise in which a cyber-security expert searches for and attempts to exploit security flaws in a digital application or infrastructure.
This simulated attack aims to identify any weaknesses in a system’s defense that an attacker might be able to use against it.
Given the proper authorization from the owners of digital assets, penetration testing includes both manual and automated tests to assess the application’s security.
The owners of the digital assets afterward receive a thorough penetration testing report that describes the scope of the test, the vulnerabilities identified along with their criticality, and the necessary mitigations.
Through penetration testing, organizations can assess how well their present security measures might stand up to a determined attacker using a variety of attack vectors. This enables you to close security gaps before attackers do so.
Here are the reasons why a company needs a penetration test.
More people are paying attention to data privacy, and governments throughout the world are putting rigorous data privacy regulations into place to safeguard their populations.
The GDPR of the European Union, the PDPA of Singapore, and the PDP Bill of Indonesia are a few examples of laws that have been enacted in various nations.
As long as the company’s clients live in that nation, such privacy rules may apply to the business. Penetration testing helps lower the likelihood of a data leak due to software vulnerabilities even if it may not immediately address concerns about data privacy.
Maintaining safety requires finding and exploiting previously unknown security holes before attackers do, which is why security patches are so prevalent in contemporary apps. Penetration tests can expose cybersecurity plans’ shortcomings that were first missed.
Because of general data protection legislation, it is now more crucial than ever to reduce cybersecurity risk and ensure data privacy. However, establishing a routine for monitoring, maintaining, and enhancing your cybersecurity posture is vital.
Management can utilize security ratings that will significantly improve the company’s capacity to achieve and maintain regulatory compliance while achieving business goals.
All that matters is reputation. It is the primary focus of the majority of businesses and what keeps everything in motion. The reputation of a company may make or break it. All the reputations you have worked so hard to establish can be destroyed by simple news about a company’s data leak.
These are the people who will be involved in the penetration test.
The preparation for the penetration testing completely depends on what you would like to achieve from penetration testing. First, you must map the attack surfaces, including external and internal.
Also read: The Ultimate Guide To Web Application Penetration Testing
Before you start the penetration test, ask yourself the following questions.
The penetration testing process begins long before an actual attack is conducted. Ethical hackers will be able to examine the system in this way, discover its advantages and disadvantages, and choose the best techniques and tools to get into it. There are normally five stages in the penetration testing procedure.
Recon is the first stage of a penetration test. The objective is planning to simulate a malicious attack that helps to obtain as much data as possible about the target system, (including details about the network architecture, operating systems and programs, user accounts, and other pertinent data) in order for the tester to develop a successful attack strategy.
The information can be obtained by interacting directly with the target system or drawing it from publically accessible resources. This is one of the time-consuming stages as the investigation is done in depth.
Once Reconnaissance finishes collecting all the pertinent information, scanning is the next step.
To find open ports and examine network activity on the target system, the tester in this case, employs a variety of tools. It’s referred to simply as vulnerability scanning and is usually an automated process.
Penetration testers need to find as many open ports as possible because these are potential attackers’ entry points. While scanning can spot a possible danger, it cannot estimate hackers’ ease of access.
Therefore, while scanning is important for cybersecurity, it also requires human involvement in the form of penetration testers to function to its fullest. This helps penetration testers to launch attacks using identified entry points in the system.
Vulnerability assessment, the third step in the penetration testing process, involves identifying potential vulnerabilities and determining whether they can be exploited. It is a helpful tool on its own but is more effective when used with the other penetration testing phases.
Penetration testers can use a variety of resources to assess the risk of vulnerabilities found at this stage such as determining the type of vulnerability scan, configuring the scan, performing the scan, evaluating risks, analyzing the scan results, and designing a remediation and mitigation plan.
This is an important step. In this scenario, a penetration tester attempts to enter the target system and exploit the flaws discovered so far. He would typically simulate actual attacks.
This is undoubtedly the most delicate penetration testing phase because it gives the testers total access to the target system. To access the target system, security restrictions must be overcome.
Even though system crashes during penetration testing are uncommon, testers still need to exercise extra caution to avoid system compromise or harm.
You need to use specific methods and skills to attack the target system. Penetration testers with experience can attack the system using their skills.
The tester begins testing after the exploitation step is over. For the firm to reduce its security risks, creating a penetration testing report requires carefully identifying vulnerabilities and clarifying them.
Any vulnerability detected in the system can be fixed, and the organization’s security posture can be strengthened, using the report produced during this last penetration testing process.
Also read: When should you conduct a web application penetration test?
There are three main types of penetration testing techniques.
The third process is more common to identify all kinds of vulnerabilities.
It’s difficult to find all vulnerabilities using automated tools. However, manual scanning can only identify some internal and external vulnerabilities that automated scanning tools cannot. Penetration testers can perform better attacks on applications based on their skills and knowledge of the system being penetrated.
Manual checks include design, business logic as well as code verification. They are usually conducted by analyzing documentation or performing interviews with the designers or system owners.
Manually reviewing the documentation, secure coding policies, security requirements, and architectural designs, should all be accomplished using manual inspections.
Also read: Learn about IoT Device Penetration Testing
Automated penetration is now a popular method for thwarting intrusions. However, most of your network’s security risks, if not all of them, may be found through automated penetration testing. Vulnerability scanning is a technique used in automated testing.
It gauges how successfully you and your group can react to online threats. It can fix problems that can cause network outages.
A penetration tester initially performs automated scans to identify the vulnerabilities. After knowing the key issues, he will perform manual testing to encroach and find vulnerabilities as the automated pentesting cannot find them in detail.
After knowing about the penetration testing process, the people involved, and the techniques, it is time to select a vendor who can perform the penetration testing better by knowing your digital asset better.
SecureLayer7 has a strong reputation among SMEs who use our penetration testing tool to run and respond to ongoing pen tests. Additionally, we assist companies in maintaining their cloud infrastructure securely by finding and affordably quarantining vulnerabilities in AWS, Azure, and Kubernetes systems.
We are a highly research-focused company that protects our customers from newly discovered Zero Day vulnerabilities. Our hybrid web application penetration testing uses manual and automated scanning to eliminate false positives while identifying vulnerabilities in resources, including web apps, mobile applications, cloud infrastructure, and servers.
Our pentesters at SecureLayer7 work with multi-national clients, and our accomplishments in the cybersecurity industry speak for themselves. Visit us now to get your digital asset pentest.